Thermal methods for enhanced oil recovery provide for a preliminary modeling of the heat-and-mass exchange processes in a reservoir (an oil reservoir) and in wells, as well as determination of thermal conditions for downhole equipment. So information on thermophysical properties of rock (such as the thermal conductivity, heat capacity and thermal diffusivity) is of primary importance.
There are known methods for determination of the thermal conductivity of porous rock, such as described in S. L. Lee, J. H. Yang, Modeling of effective thermal conductivity for a non-homogeneous anisotropic porous medium, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, Vol. 41, Issue 6-7, pp. 931-937, 1998, or described in H. Ye, Effective thermal conductivity of two-scale porous media, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 89, 081908 (2006).
However, the above-mentioned methods allow for determining thermal conductivity of only small-sized samples and are characterized by increased labor requirements and increased time consumption.